Recently I shared how on the night that the president was first inaugurated, a group of senior Republican senators and congressmen including Paul Ryan and Jim DeMint got together at the Caucus Room restaurant and pledged to do everything they could to obstruct and destroy his presidency.

Congressman Pete Sessions later told the National Journal that their strategy was derived from the Taliban. He said that they learned from the Taliban how to “disrupt” a party or person’s patterns, and, if they didn’t get what they wanted from the president, would become a “Taliban insurgency.”

Now comes a list, which will almost certainly not show up on GOP TV, a.k.a. Fox so-called News, or on GOP radio, a.k.a. right wing talk radio, that shows clearly and says loudly the real priorities of the Republican Party.

And those priorities have nothing to do with you or me, except in as how they want to let giant transnational corporations and billionaires steal more of our money and destroy more of our nation’s commons.

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The Republicans have issued their demand list in exchange for their hostage taking of the nation’s debt ceiling.

The list is pretty simple and quite illustrative.

In order to raise the debt ceiling so that the United States government can pay off bills from George Bush’s wars, bills already run up and committed to by the Republican Party, they are demanding that President Obama do the following:

First, Republicans say the president must approve the Keystone pipeline right now. This of course is a pipeline on to buy a foreign corporation – TransCanada – which will transport foreign Canadian oil from a foreign country – Canada – to refineries owned in part by the Koch brothers along the Gulf Coast where it will be converted into diesel fuel and gasoline for export to China, Mexico, Brazil, and England. TransCanada itself has said that this pipeline will raise the cost of gasoline in the United States, because instead of refining it in the Midwest for domestic uses they are doing now, they will be able to refine it at the Gulf seaports where they can load it on giant tankers and ship it to other countries. So for the first Republican priority, billionaires get richer, oil companies get richer, foreign countries get Canadian oil, and Americans who drive get screwed – and get to keep the pollution and its attendant cancers from the refining process.

Second, Republicans say the president should postpone giving health care to 50 million uninsured Americans for at least a year. They also want him to cut $120 billion out of the Medicaid program, which is health care for poor people, mostly poor children, the disabled, and the poor elderly. Nobody can quite explain why they are so adamant about this. If Obamacare is going to be a big failure, you’d think they would want it to go into effect right away so the president could have egg on his face. So…could it be that they are afraid people will like it as much as people like Medicare and Social Security – two other programs that they fought tooth and nail and still hate – and thus it will be even harder to get rid of the future?

Third, Republicans demand that the president must abolish the Consumer Protection Bureau. They do not want you or me to be protected from predatory big banks, and they want to make it easier for banksters to get away with multibillion-dollar crimes and multimillion-dollar paydays. It’s frankly astounding that they can even say this with a straight face.

Fourth, before they’ll pay the bills for Bush’s wars, Republicans demand that the president make the big oil industry and its billionaire owners like the Koch brothers even more profitable, by cutting back on clean air standards and EPA regulations that save millions of lives and reduce Climate Change. They also want the president to give more of your and my federal lands to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners. What do we get out of this? Nothing. What do the Koch brothers, who fund the Tea Party Republicans in Congress, get out of it? Billions.

If the president doesn’t do all these things, Republicans say, they will refuse to raise the nation’s debt ceiling so that we can pay for the bills brought up George W Bush.It’s frankly astounding how the Republican Party has officially given up even the pretense of caring about average Americans. They are now proudly the Party of the billionaires and the transnational corporations.

The interesting question now is how much work Republican radio and TV will have to do to cover this up, and how long it will be before Republican-voting working-class Americans figure out what the hell is really going on here.

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